What E-Book Publishing Can’t Do

As many of you know, I’m writing a memoir of my late sister, her life and her death, and what that had to do with my decision to return to my hometown. I am about an hour away from completing the final chapter of the rough draft. I sent the whole manuscript, minus this last chapter, to my editor at the publishing house before I went to Paris. He will be sending it back to me with all his notes sometime this week, and the revision stage will begin. We talked for half an hour on Friday about his general take on what he’s read, and directions I’ll need to go for the revision.

I found this immensely encouraging, frankly. I did my very best on the rough draft, and if I had published it myself as an e-book, as more people are doing, it would have been a good effort, I think. I might have made some decent money on it, I dunno, cutting out the middleman, and such. But here’s the thing: a good editor always, always, always improves your best work. This book is especially important to me, because it is so close to my heart, given that it’s about my family. I’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of me on the rewrite, but it’s a real gift to be able to work with someone who can draw something exceptional, and maybe even great, out of what was my best initial effort.

I don’t think there are many professional writers who have reason to be so confident in their own skills that they don’t need an editor. I’m certainly not, nor do I have reason to be. A friend of mine who used to work at a magazine that publishes some of the best-known journalists in America said you’d be shocked by how rough their copy was, until experienced editors got hold of it. I’m pretty sure that if I had published my rough draft straight to e-book, it would have been nothing to be ashamed of. But I’m also sure that the final version that will come out from my publisher next year, having been through a careful editing process, will be something I can be proud of.

UPDATE: I should have clarified in the original post that by “e-book publishing,” I mean electronic self-publishing, straight-to-Kindle-style, like what Neal Pollack describes.

I am looking forward to reading it. I had resolved not to, when it looked from some of you earlier posts immediately before and after your move that the book would be a hagiography, but more recent posts you’ve made on recent threads makes it look like your sister may have been more complicated and interesting.

I think this is also the hallmark of a good blog site. Yes, there are a few people out there who can write a rough draft blog posting and make it pretty good. There are also people who can self edit (I try to do this myself, but it’s incredibly hard to see past your own blind spots).

Good writers are a dime a dozen. You have tons of them among your commenters here. Good editors are a jewel.

On a related note, is there any possible way that TAC could allow you to view your comment and edit it before submitting? I understand this would require some back-end work, perhaps fairly hefty work, but could it be added to the “to do” list?

Rarely does our best work result from total isolation. We can see this in the musical world. When someone in the musical world has a big hit and becomes famous, you can bet that that their material from that point on will be of a lesser quality. They don’t have to listen to anyone else’s viewponts after they become famous.

I am looking forward to reading it. I had resolved not to, when it looked from some of you earlier posts immediately before and after your move that the book would be a hagiography, but more recent posts you’ve made on recent threads makes it look like your sister may have been more complicated and interesting.

Oh, she definitely was, and in ways that really hurt me, to be honest. There was a recent revelation that I found extremely hard to take. None of which takes away from what I still believe to have been her overwhelming goodness. But it does complicate things — all having to do with her relationship to me, I must say. She was a complicated person. I wrote to a couple of writer friends after I learned this thing — I’m saving it for the book — and told them how hard this was for me to deal with. They both said that this actually makes the book even more relevant, because they have to deal with the same things in their families, and it’s a lot more true to life to learn that my sister may have been a saint, but she was no saint. If you follow me.

(One of my writer friends comments on this blog as Sam M. Sam, if you write here about this, please keep specifics of our recent email about this to yourself, just for book purposes.)

Rod,
I’m wondering why you state that e-book publishing can’t do this. I bet there are plenty of talented editors available for freelance work who would be more than happy to edit a book that will be self published. Keep in mind that I’m no writer or even very familiar with editing in general, just a thought.

I also am looking forward to the book. And I’ll probably get the paper version, even if it comes out in e-whatever format (I’m assuming there will be both paper and e-versions of the book, but I don’t know what your plans are).

When I got hold of an e-reader with the e-ink display, I thought I finally could commit to e-books for my future reading. But I have become soured on the format not because of the reader, but because of the horrendous copy-editing done on the e-versions of books (which is to say, there appears to be no copy-editing at all.) Every single ebook I have so far purchased has come with egregious errors in spelling, oftentimes amounting to utterly garbled text. Sometimes the errors are easy to identify as lazy spellcheck errors where a correctly spelled but otherwise nonsensical word got through. But occasionally, the text is just plain garbled. I suspect publishers are doing optical scanning and just not checking the results (most of the titles I have purchased in e-format are conversions of texts published before the electronic publishing age), but this doesn’t explain newer titles that were written directly into an electronic format.

If your publisher releases an e-version of your book, for the love of God, insist they copy-edit the thing.

You can hire editorial services if you self-publish, Rod. You may not get the top-tier editing a major publishing house can provide, but you also aren’t having to beat the slush pile to get the chance to do so. You can beat the pile because you are a political pundit with name recognition and an established fan base (though some days it seems more like foe base.)

But self-publishing comes with its own pitfalls, too many to go into detail here. I think it’s good for midlist authors and people who wouldn’t get published in the increasingly conservative and credentials-needed world of the big publishers, but that’s just me.

With regard to this post: Amen. My first book got, essentially, zero editing. It was through a small house rather than a vanity press, but resources were still pretty limited. I am happy with the book, but I don’t love it like I might have. I would have loved to have gotten more feedback, both stylistically and thematically.

Memoir is a bit different. Still, it’s great to have someone asking hard questions and really challenging you.

Regarding magazines, I think the leeway to submit rough copy is one of the great gifts an editor can give to a write. Give me your first, raw take on things. Your visceral reactions to what you saw. Don’t worry too much about word count or any of that. What’s interesting here? What works? What can we sacrifice? To be able to go through that with someone you trust is invaluable.

To Geoff G.’s point above, if an editor had looked at this post then likely that editor would have questioned Rod’s conflation of “e-book publishing” with “unedited self-publishing.” And the latter note is to Dave D.’s point, which is precisely right: self-publishing need not necessarily be unedited either.

Certainly glad for your success, Rod, and look forward to reading your book when it comes out.

There are plenty of big name authors who are starting to bypass the big publishing houses altogether and self-publishing their own work, after, of course, working with good editors. They realize that what they get from their publisher isn’t worth the publisher’s cut from their royalities. There’s also a wrong assumption that getting the “good book” seal of approval from a big publisher is somehow a sign of a good story, or good nonfiction, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Big publishing in the current form is dead man walking. They know it. Apple and Amazon know it, too. What’ll remain after the dust settles will be a few vanity publishers akin to the companies still pressing vinyl records.

E-publishing removes the barriers to entry for people who haven’t been published or who don’t get 6 and 7 figure advances. It definitely democratizes publishing and takes the control out of the hands of a few. The downside is that we will end up with a lot of dreck, but there is also the chance that someone who was rejected by the big houses and agents will get some notice.

There are plenty of big name authors who are starting to bypass the big publishing houses altogether and self-publishing their own work, after, of course, working with good editors. They realize that what they get from their publisher isn’t worth the publisher’s cut from their royalities. There’s also a wrong assumption that getting the “good book” seal of approval from a big publisher is somehow a sign of a good story, or good nonfiction, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Big publishing in the current form is dead man walking. They know it. Apple and Amazon know it, too. What’ll remain after the dust settles will be a few vanity publishers akin to the companies still pressing vinyl records.

I plan to self-publish, but I have to speak up here. This isn’t true. Very few “big authors” bypass the big houses and e-publish exclusively. J.A. Konrath and Amanda Hocking are the two names that come up. The latter published traditionally before, grew a fan base and then shifted to ebooks. The latter went the ebook route yes, but she also secured a traditional deal when people saw she was the real thing, and now you can buy her books in Walmart.

The reason is that a big publisher does a lot for you. Publicity is the biggest thing. You simply will not be able to push an e-book as well as the big houses can. You can try, but it’s like anything that goes viral: it’s seemingly a matter of chance and luck. The publisher also handles the print edition, which self-publishing is horrible at. Ebook formatting is nowhere near as complex as making a good print book, and many writers simply aren’t writers or typographers. Print-on-Demand has lowered the cost considerably, but you are stuck in trade paper and often at fairly high costs to release. Plus, you can’t get into a retail store worth a damn: you’ll sell print books online only.

While I do agree that a deal from a big house doesn’t mean the book is good (see Dean Koonz’s Breathless, the Eragon trilogy, or James Patterson’s entire output recently) it does do one thing that e-book publishing doesn’t-screen out incompetent books. There are a lot of them that are pure vanity projects where the author has little skill at the basics of a story or even writing. Essentially if you like to read ebooks, you become the guy at the big publishing house that has to sift through the slushpile and read.

It’s still worth it though. I’ve found some great e-books done with surprising quality. Especially if your tastes range to the eclectic or non-standard, or the reverse where you hungrily devour genre fiction and want more. Eden’s Root by Rachel Fisher, and Running Black by Patrick Todoroff are good examples of ebook indie fiction done very well. Even flawed books can be fun to read, and since the price of owning them is trivial, there’s less of a sting when you read a bad one.

But big publishing is here to stay, just like big Hollywood is. While the indie route is becoming a legitimate path to publication, it’s never going to wholly replace it.

An editor’s job is to find the “spark” in a manuscript, and to find a way to develop that spark into the identity for the book. The spark is an author’s unique contribution to public discourse, or literature, or whatever. In my experience as an editor at a (very) major publisher, I can say with confidence that authors seldom recognize their own spark. It’s that lack of self-awareness that helped launch the entire industry.

I am truly sorry for the hurt you have experienced on a personal level. From a story-telling perspective, that hurt is what will create resonance with your audience. Humans are complex creatures, and capturing such has long been the stuff of great publishing. I wish you both peace and success.

Exactly. You can hire an editor yourself but so many self-publishers don’t.

This is why I don’t pay money for self-published works. The next well-written, well-edited one will be my first.

This seems to me the only service these days that publishers provide that I, a consumer of books, would really care about. (Publicity, cover art, etc? Why should I care about that?) But it is enough for me to still pay the premium for published works.

Any more “dreck” than we have now? I doubt it. Big publishers are certainly shoveling out their share of dreck. Just because it is nicely packaged dreck, backed up by a big promotional budget, doesn’t mean it is dreck. It reminds me of the Youtube video of the famous American violinist, Joshua Bell, performing in the DC subway. What was amazing is that only one person stopped to listen to him. So Joshua Bell was ignored because he wasn’t “packaged” or staged correctly….and because people were too busy to recognize a great musician in the midst of their everyday lives.

As an editor myself, I am grateful for your recognition of the important role that editors play, in academic life especially. The idea that “professor = polished writer” is an enormous fallacy. I often have recourse to a phrase that I think Midge Decter coined: “typewriter job,” meaning that many articles require an entire re-write, even from leading scholars in the field. Alas, even university presses are doing away with editors, and it shows in painful and embarrassing ways.

Dave D., big publishing may be here to stay, but like the newspaper industry, most publishing companies may have to learn to adapt to a world where electronic communication is also here to stay.

Most big publishers won’t accept submissions from first-time writers or from authors whose works aren’t being promoted by a literary agent (and no legitimate literary agent will represent previously unpublished and unknown authors). Most publishers, big or small, won’t accept multiple submissions (meaning that you can’t send your MS to the second company on your list until the first has officially rejected it, which generally takes 3-6 months or longer). Few publishing companies will accept electronic submissions–you have to print multiple dead-tree copies of a manuscript that is usually going to run two to three hundred pages in length, and then you have to waste the energy involved in shipping that copy to the publishers on your list (SASE included if you don’t want them to shred the thing while they’re printing the rejection letter, though some of them won’t bother returning it anyway). And there are dozens more little “rules” every aspiring writer has to learn, memorize, and embrace.

If an unknown writer manages to jump through all the hoops to get a second or third tier company to read his or her MS, endures the agonizingly slow rejection process, and finally gets an acceptance letter, you can forget high-quality professional editing, aggressive marketing, etc. for the ordinary writer. The publisher will toss the lightly-edited (if that) book out amid a sea of other offerings, and unless the writer happens to strike the public’s fancy on his or her own, too bad.

There is one huge exception to this: become a celebrity first, and *then* express interest in writing a book to any publisher, including one of the Big Six. Even if you can barely string a sentence together and have nothing interesting to say, you’ll get a book deal, a top-tier editor, and if necessary (and it probably will be) a ghostwriter in no time at all. The company will be booking your promotion tour before the ghostwriter has even finished interviewing you for the first chapter.

Since this is the reality and has been since the buggy-whip days, writers who embrace self-publishing know quite well that we’ve got a tiny window here to show that we can produce decently written and well-edited content and reach enough of a sample of our target market to make the enterprise worthwhile. Some of us may not be able to do it right–I may not. But compared to “no chance at all” of ever having anyone other than my own children and a handful of their friends and cousins read the children’s fiction I’ve written, I’m taking a shot at this.

Exactly. You can hire an editor yourself but so many self-publishers don’t.
This is why I don’t pay money for self-published works. The next well-written, well-edited one will be my first.

I don’t think you always need to hire a professional editor to make a good book. I think it’s possible for an indie writer to become a good editor by cultivating the tools to do so. It’s not easy at all, and it’s 90% easier just to have someone else do it, but I can’t help but think we oversell professional editors a bit too much.

See, your average editor isn’t looking for a spark, he’s looking to make the manuscript he receives as good as possible so that it will fit in the line of his press, sell well, and be highly marketable as to make money. If you look at modern genre fiction, if anything the trend is to conservatism and homogenization: contemporary fantasy is dominated by paranormal romance, same as YA fiction. Editors need to make money, and that drives a lot of editorial decisions.

It’s just with indie books so few give editing any importance at all. I don’t blame you, and I thank God they give free samples of all ebooks. Download the first 20% and you can see which ones should be avoided.

Any more “dreck” than we have now? I doubt it. Big publishers are certainly shoveling out their share of dreck. Just because it is nicely packaged dreck, backed up by a big promotional budget, doesn’t mean it is dreck. It reminds me of the Youtube video of the famous American violinist, Joshua Bell, performing in the DC subway. What was amazing is that only one person stopped to listen to him. So Joshua Bell was ignored because he wasn’t “packaged” or staged correctly….and because people were too busy to recognize a great musician in the midst of their everyday lives.

Mike, I’m sorry, but yes, more than we have now. The big publishers serve as gatekeepers and barriers to entry, and at the least they prevent books that have no reason to be published from being so. I’m not talking good books that are flawed, or are not marketable, but ones that have no idea how to tell any story.

Imagine during a formal dinner you had a crowd of Joshua Bell impersonators in front of you, each with his own violin. You would have to tap one on the shoulder to get him to start playing, and only then could you find out how good he was. Many can’t play at all, because they were hired to fill space or came in for the free food. Some play passably, some play very well, and one of them is Bell himself. That’s kind of the dilemma with ebooks now. Trying to find the quality in a flood of names and books.

If we were all writers with an existing platform, an agent and sucessful previous books, then we would all use the services of editors. Well, I’m sure there are those who feel that their work is too perfect to be sullied by a mere editor. But most writers would love to have someone who would work to improve their books with them. But I’m also sure that most people would love to drive a Mercedes Benz when they drive. Such is life. You do the best you can with what you have.

An editor who works with a writer tries to help the writer say what he needs to say in the most artful and persuasive way possible. Depending on the nature of the project (fiction, non-fiction, opinion writing, technical writing, etc.), he will work with the writer to help him see where he’s going off-track, which passages need more help, what he’s doing especially well, and so forth. He’s an intelligent and constructive critic, as well as something of a psychologist, given how neurotic many writers are.

I had the privilege of having Rod edit something for me once (that Santa essay that went into the DMN–some of Rod’s other regulars from other blogs might remember it). It was a terrific experience, because non-fiction isn’t my best strength, and I felt like the changes Rod made helped me say what I wanted to say better than I had said it.

But to do that an editor also has to have a bit of intuition about the writer as a person and what he or she really is trying to say–and, again, that’s what novice writers begging to get one foot in the door often don’t get. (I imagine they get to share overworked junior editors with other novices, but I admit that I don’t know that for a fact.)

Self-editing is agonizing, slow, treacherous, dull, repetitive work. But it’s better than editing which is badly done or which leaves both the writer and the publisher wholly unsatisfied with the results.

Rod Dreher writes: “Depending on the nature of the project (fiction, non-fiction, opinion writing, technical writing, etc.), he will work with the writer to help him see where he’s going off-track, which passages need more help, what he’s doing especially well, and so forth.”

Yes. And also, he – or she, since it’s often a she – will usually need to check such matters as the writer’s grammar, spelling, syntax, and correct usage of foreign words.

It’s amazing how many authors simply can’t be bothered with these things. Perhaps they think that concern for such “details” will smother their creativity or something. I can think of one fairly widely published author – with something like a dozen science-fiction books to his name, as well as half-a-dozen works of non-fiction, not to mention a doctorate from a respectable university – who supposed, until an editor had to inform him otherwise, that the correct spelling of “bon mot” was “bon motte”.

One time I read a self-published book from a local author and reviewed it. I finished—but barely. Despite the interesting subject matter, the book had numerous spelling mistakes and instances of horrible grammar. After the review ran, I gave the author the email address of a freelance editor, and thankfully she hired him. I left before that person’s second novel, but I am comforted that at least I helped one self-published author realize an editor’s worth.

Rod, you gave a good description of the job duties. With cutbacks, though, I would add that sometimes an editor has to do line-editing as well as graphic design (at least in my industry).

Maybe you’re saving it for your book—and if I’m being too nosy, I’m sorry—but what would Ruthie have thought of Hannah traveling abroad to Paris?

Editors do many things. We cut out fluff/fat/foolishness. We tighten up loose paragraphs, saying more concisely in fewer words what authors may have said more diffusely and confusingly. We untangle tortured sentences or paragraphs. We get authors to unpack dense, needlessly complicated, or unduly compact ideas, offering more detail to clarify key concepts. Some of us do more “technical” things such as formatting footnotes correctly, correcting grammar and spelling, etc. We may verify sources if necessary, or look for sources if claims are made without demonstrable evidence. These are just a few of the tasks. You’d be surprised at how badly many people, including people who have been writing for years or teach at prominent schools, cannot write well.

There are two reflections on editing I keep posted over my desk. The first comes from the late Richard John Neuhaus, who wrote in February 2004 that “It is not sufficiently appreciated that editing is a self-effacing vocation. An editor is the servant of both author and reader, although authors are sometimes less than grateful for the help. To be an editor is to be aware of the road not taken. When editing the work of others, one’s own goes unwritten. Ambrose Bierce somewhere said that a saint is a dead sinner well edited.”

The second is from an essay by Norm Podhoretz, “In Defense of Editing”: “It takes a great deal of work, an enervating concentration on detail, and a fanatical concern with the bone and sinew of the English language to edit a manuscript….Is it all worth it? Over and over again one asks oneself that question, tempted as one is to hoard some of the energy that goes into editing for thinking one’s own thoughts or doing one’s own writing. In the end an editor is thrown back, as any man doing any job faithfully must be, on the fact that he cares and that he can therefore do no other.”

Oh, and a couple of practical things I always tell my students:
1) ALL writers, INCLUDING editors themselves, need someone else to edit their work. There is always room for improvement.
2) You can NEVER edit well on screen, but ONLY from a hard copy. It is foolishness to rely on a computer to “edit” your paper.

Thank you, Brian. I didn’t have the courage to ask the question. I was always unsure, for example, what an editor would have done for Hemingway or Steinbeck. And thanks to Rod for the explanation. Though in a similar manner, I doubt his need of an editor as well. Perhaps the occasional comma fault?

I actually did some “editing” of technical prose for several projects I worked on, mainly because engineers as a class are not only congenitally semi-illiterate but yet are thus concomitantly unable to write clear technically reasoned prose from the requirements to the specification to their implementation. Execrable jargon-laden turgid inscrutable enigmatic and downright incoherent text that could cause a fatal migraine in any astute reader. Grammar that would induce a high-school English teacher to open his veins in despair. And, yes, as incredible as it seems, comma fault.

Mind you, these same agrammatical geeks could have described their work in Lisp in a heartbeat. But that is another level of discourse.

I dispute the claim but whenever I don my intellectual war raiment, she conquers easily by force of rationality, scholarship, grace and charm. In another epoch, she’d have led a salon. So much the worse for our present age.

Dave D., big publishing may be here to stay, but like the newspaper industry, most publishing companies may have to learn to adapt to a world where electronic communication is also here to stay.

Erin, I agree with everything you said. However, some people think that the rise of the indie author will kill the legacy publishing houses. They wont, and at best will be an alternative way of making a living off of your written work. We have to be realistic about what we do.

It’s amazing how many authors simply can’t be bothered with these things. Perhaps they think that concern for such “details” will smother their creativity or something. I can think of one fairly widely published author – with something like a dozen science-fiction books to his name, as well as half-a-dozen works of non-fiction, not to mention a doctorate from a respectable university – who supposed, until an editor had to inform him otherwise, that the correct spelling of “bon mot” was “bon motte”.

It’s hard to be aware of your own blind spots. You have to be willing to examine yourself critically, and you don’t have the advantage of unfamiliarity that reading someone else’s work brings. That can be draining, especially when we have to steal every spare moment to work on our book and our revisions of it.

t’s just with indie books so few give editing any importance at all. I don’t blame you, and I thank God they give free samples of all ebooks. Download the first 20% and you can see which ones should be avoided.

My time is also money. Why would I read the first 20% of what will almost invariably be terrible? Better to have someone else make that first pass, *then* look at the excerpt.

I agree that writers need editors. I am lucky that I have people who read and edit my briefs before filing. Sadly, many law offices demand an “unedited” writing sample as part of the application procedure. So the employers demand that employees show the lack of judgment to file something significant without finding someone to edit it.

As to self-publishing, my guess is that free lance editors will start popping up because they are so helpful for all the reasons Dreher explains. Cheaper ones will be no more than copy editors, but more expensive ones will do more thorough jobs.

I agree wholeheartedly that there is no replacement for a good editor. However, from what I’ve heard about the current state of the publishing industry, a lot of editors are more concerned with getting the book on the market than ensuring the piece is quality. This even extends to really minor stuff like spelling and grammatical errors. Look in a college textbook. So. many. errors!!! It’s all about turnover and profit. Truly a blessing that you seem to have found an editor that understands there is no replacement for quality writing.

On a side note, many publishers seem to be making e-book versions of hard literature. Any chance your book could be adapted to an e-book post publishing?

My time is also money. Why would I read the first 20% of what will almost invariably be terrible? Better to have someone else make that first pass, *then* look at the excerpt.

Because it won’t invariably be terrible. There may be a higher chance of it having mechanical errors, but there are plenty that aren’t terrible and are good to read. And because they self-publish, they can create works that most publishing houses would pass on because they feel they aren’t marketable to compete on the small shelf-space of most bookstores.

This is important especially in genre fiction, where huge series dominate shelf-space and promotional budgets, squeezing out smaller books. Back in the 80s for SF and fantasy you’d get a lot of new authors, a lot of one-off books, and much more varied a bookshelf than now: it’s all marketable books like massive series and video game or movie tie-in novels.

So indies are valuable because they aren’t part of that culture. You can write a cyberpunk book and not have to worry that the current market only will buy paranormal fantasy, and you’ll never get past most editors because they can just publish the hundredth Dresden Files book, or because they can novelize the latest MMORPG on the cheap.